And as usual they claim that China is only capable of stealing and copying. It's always the same mistake, and the same outcome.

It's because they think they can launch capacity faster than they can built it on Earth. Instead of dealing with local government, grid energy supply availability, water and so on, they can just launch it into orbit. It's all about being the first to deploy the compute capacity and cornering the market.

Of course it also creates lots of business for SpaceX, so a lot of it could be a Hyperloop-style scam.

Thing is they need to deal with the pollution it will create (stuff burning up on re-entry doesn't just vanish), frequency allocations for the comms, and the fact that now everyone wants their own 50,000 satellite constellation in those prime orbits.

The technical hurdles are relatively trivial in comparison.

Yeah, no naturally it was modded down. There are some real luddites around here.

Sure, but thinking further ahead, e.g. the plan for Starship is to land vertically on the moon and then lift off again. The renders they have produced show landing struts, presumably derived from the booster ones.

The Chinese lander shown off a few years ago looks to be more like the Apollo LM and planned Soviet LK, so they don't need that capability to hit their "before 2030" goal.

Presumably that's why they envision having 50,000 of them. One alone won't do much, dozens or even hundreds of them all reflecting at the same spot...

Depends, is the amount of solar it generates at night going to offset more heating than it causes?

In fact China has brought in a lot of fairly strict environmental policies in the last few decades, which often have quite dramatic effects on local industry. For example, no factories within half a kilometre of most rivers, and no discharging untreated waste into them.

Then there is the massive and frankly staggering rate at which they have adopted renewables. Hit their Paris targets 5 years early, and those were considered too ambitious to be realistic at the time.

"But China" was never a good argument, but these days it's laughable.

TACO: Trump Always Chickens Out.

All the EU has to do is hold its nerve until he relents.

Mamdani hasn't been in long but has already

- Froze rent for 2 million New Yorkers
- Cut subway fares in half for low-income riders
- Fully funded NYC parks
- Added $680M for public schools
- Launched free child care for 2-year-olds

All things that we were assured were impossible, would crash the economy, would bankrupt the state etc. Oh, and he balanced the budget.

Politicians absolutely can help the people they are supposed to work for. Socialism absolutely does work. It's just that it works for you, not billionaires, so they are very keen to convince that they you can't possible have it and it's all just a fantasy.

They drive themselves most of the time, and on the odd occasion when they are unsure or the passenger calls for assistance, a human can intervene. They don't drive the car directly, they just tell it if it can proceed, which route to take, that kind of thing.

It helps deal with the corner cases that are hard to engineer general solutions for.

The main difference between that and driver aid systems is that the car doesn't need immediate intervention to be safe. It will stop and call for help. Driver aids need the driver to be paying constant attention, which is why the Tesla ones result in so many injuries and fatalities.

It's mostly better. While the barge has to be a bit more complex because it has to have the lattice of ropes (it's not a net), it means that the booster doesn't have to have landing struts. That's a significant weight saving, which means less propellant needed too.

It likely also means that the system is less dependent on good weather, and better able to recover from small issues that would tip self supporting boosters over. IIRC the Blue Origin system actually welds itself to the deck when it lands to help with that, which obviously makes the legs disposable.

The only real downside is that it does require that barge to land, so to land on the moon you would need to first land a landing station. That won't be an issue for the first manned trips, and longer term it may have advantages because the vehicle's engine can be shut off at higher altitude and kick up less regolith.

Exciting times and another technique added to the list of options. We will see which becomes the preferred one, but competition in this area is going to be good for getting costs down.

Facebook is not in chronological order.

It has created massive personal inflation for some people.

The EU decided that to protect local middlemen they would introduce a 3 Euro charge per item type on packages being imported. It seems to have been targeted at sites like AliExpress and Temu. I'm sure they will sooner or later set up local distribution warehouses inside the EU - in fact they already have some, so that popular items and heavily discounted ones can be delivered more quickly and cheaply. I suppose that creates some jobs, but it must be very annoying for people buying less popular stuff who are forced to pay the 3 Euro or buy from a middleman.

Games are around $70 today, which adjusted for inflation is about $32 in 1996. If you look at ads from back then, games were typically $50 on the original Playstation.

What's happened is many of the basics of life have been squeezed. Housing, education, utilities. Meanwhile wages have stagnated, in real terms.